{"id":27345,"date":"2013-03-22T18:09:55","date_gmt":"2013-03-22T14:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=27345"},"modified":"2013-03-22T18:13:39","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T14:13:39","slug":"football-buying-into-globalised-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-sports-news-and-analysis\/football-buying-into-globalised-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"Football: Buying into Globalised Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Etihad-Man-City-plane\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Owners of football clubs have always been quirky. Forty years ago many of them would be local worthies who enjoyed the prestige of being associated with a league club, with deep enough pockets to splurge on eye-catching transfers. TV money was modest \u2013 no satellite revenue then \u2013 and the idea that you might make a buck by selling shirts in China emblazoned with the name of your star player would have had the average chairman choking with laughter over his match-day pork pie.<\/p>\n

Fools and their money are easily parted, and there have been a lot of fools in football over the years. They are still there, only they are different types of fools.<\/p>\n

Some are greedy, some seem unhinged. Few are football fans. Gone are the quixotic, ego-driven super-fans willing to sink their hard-won fortunes into a local club for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the great and the good in the boardroom and a few column inches in the daily newspapers in the full knowledge that they would never recoup their investments.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s owners are cold-eyed investors \u2013 smart ones and dumb ones. The more successful among them know a bit about sport before they pick their target with a pin on the map. The owners of Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United have portfolios of sporting enterprises. They think of clubs as \u201csports franchises\u201d. They cut their teeth on the North American major leagues of baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey.<\/p>\n

Competing with them are the plutocrats with a variety of agendas. Disgraced Thai politicians, Russian oligarchs and operators of Gulf sovereign wealth funds. Some of them are consortia, like the owners of QPR, a club that has seen more ownership changes in recent years than an aging exhibit in a used car auction. And then there\u2019s Venky\u2019s, the Indian chicken producers whose very name must strike the stolid Lancastrians of Blackburn as odd \u2013 like a male cousin of those fluffy names favoured by middle-class Indian families for their daughters: Pritti and Pinkie.<\/p>\n

Venky\u2019s have managed to get through three managers in this season alone. The last one, Michael Appleton, met his end by letter at the hands of a corporate gofer (Shebby Singh, another name likely to provoke mirth among Blackburn\u2019s far right British National Party adherents) whom he never met during his 67-day tenure. The club\u2019s chief executive hadn\u2019t a clue about the sacking until it happened. It was Appleton\u2019s dismissal that prompted the comment by the League Manager\u2019s Association\u00a0as reported by the BBC.<\/a><\/p>\n

Leaving aside for a moment the eccentricities of the owners, what I find interesting about English football is the way it reflects the massive change that globalisation has induced in the national psyche.<\/p>\n

When I was growing up, football clubs still had a strong local flavour. Though the burgeoning transfer market produced teams drawn from all parts of the British Isles, more or less every club had a local hero or two \u2013 players born and bred in the vicinity. Fans identified with them. They rejoiced in their success. Kids wanted to be like them. That ethos remains in some clubs. Michael Owen, though not a native Liverpudlian, was a Liverpool man from childhood. When he left Anfield to join Newcastle, many of the Liverpool faithful spoke of betrayal.<\/p>\n

But these days, fans seem quite content to support their local teams, even when there is not a single English \u2013 let alone local \u2013 player on the team sheet. They might hurl derision and contempt at the corporate stooges who control their clubs. But they seem as willing to take to their hearts a player from Congo, Japan or Bosnia Montenegro as they would an English lad \u2013 provided he does the business on the pitch. The deep affection of Chelsea fans for Gianfranco Zola, and the outpouring of sympathy for the plight of Patrice Muamba, the Bolton player who nearly died on the pitch from a heart attack last year, are cases in point.<\/p>\n

Just as football fans have become used to their game becoming an international product \u2013 notwithstanding the occasional bout of racist bite-back \u2013 so the average Brit on the street accepts as a given that they can go through their lives without ever having to buy a home-grown product. Our software originates largely from America, our cars from anywhere but Britain, even if some are manufactured on home soil. We buy clothes sourced from all parts of the world. We buy white goods from Japan, China and even Turkey these days. And our electronics come predominantly from the Far East, even if they bear the logos of American brands like Apple and HP.<\/p>\n

About the only British name you might regularly encounter in a British household is Dyson, and even the eponymous inventor of the rotary vacuum cleaner is now outsourcing much of his manufacturing abroad.<\/p>\n

British products, such as remain, have become in many cases retro fashion items \u2013 like the Roberts radios in those sturdy padded boxes with handles that used to be popular in the sixties and seventies \u2013 now reinvented as digital radios.<\/p>\n

After centuries when our economy was fuelled by cheap labour and the import at preferential prices of raw materials from our far-flung empire, we have reverted to our former type \u2013 a nation of shop-keepers, or, in modern parlance, of service providers. Also of scientists, researchers and educators. But making things is not what we do any more.<\/p>\n

Will we ever return to the factories and foundries that proudly turn out products with \u201cMade in Great Britain\u201d emblazoned on them? Perhaps not until the massive wage differentials between today\u2019s manufacturing economies and ours narrows to the point where goods made and exported from the UK become profitable again. Who knows? It might happen. Labour costs in China and India are rising, whereas the wealth of the average Brit has, by some measures, declined by 9% since the financial crisis begun five years ago. But in the short term, our best hope is to specialise, innovate and hold on to a market lead for as long as possible until competitors manage to trump, clone or steal the technology. Like Dyson \u2013 and a host of German manufacturers who are successfully bucking the trend.<\/p>\n

Will we ever again see an English leading football club win a championship with an all-English team? Not likely. And I\u2019m not sure anyone in my home country really cares about that, any more than they care about the origin of their cars, jeans, phones and washing machines. I guess we have to be content that in the Premier League we have a market-leading product, even if much of the revenue goes straight into the pockets of foreign players and corporations who will eventually syphon the funds off into tax-efficient offshore locations.<\/p>\n

As long as the foreign players keep eating in our restaurants, employing our gardeners, buying our mansions and consuming our fashion, we should be content in the knowledge that a small margin from those transactions seeps into our economy.<\/p>\n

Why rational businessmen or plutocrats continue to buy into English football when a run of bad results \u2013 through misfortune or incompetence \u2013 can cause you lose half of your investment in a year continues to escape me. Perhaps because these days there are enough fools out there with a few hundred million to spare who don\u2019t mind pouring them down a black hole. Which makes you wonder how they came by their millions in the first place. \u00a0Many of their forays into football look like bouts of temporary insanity from where I stand.<\/p>\n

But then I guess it\u2019s more fun than investing in a bank, and no more risky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STEVE ROYSTON: Many of their forays into football look like bouts of temporary insanity from where I stand. But then I guess it\u2019s more fun than investing in a bank, and no more risky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":27346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,7],"tags":[338,3784],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27345"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27345"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27349,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27345\/revisions\/27349"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}